Posts Tagged ‘Memory of a Broken Dimension’

We’ve all downloaded something weird from the Internet because the cool kids were doing it. That’s one of the points of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, even. But with Memory of a Broken Dimension, you get an unsettling mystery. It’s presented as an emulator for an old operating system, with strange programs you need to coax into life by tap-tappy-tapping in commands. It’s also a first-person puzzle-platformer, exploring wonky fragmented scenes where it’s not clear whether they’re glitching out because of corrupted data or something sinister. It’s an Internet ghost story, and it looks ace in a new trailer.

We’ve peered at the glitchy, distorted Memory of a Broken Dimensionbefore but an insightful post over at Eurogamer alerts me that a new playable version is now available, featuring the first-person sections that follow the nightmarish command line opening. It does tickle the memories – of DOS and directories – and there is something dark and dangerous lurking between the static bursts and confused mechanics of its shattered world. You can play online or download, for either Mac or Windows, and I suggest that you do so as soon as all of the light has withdrawn from your corner of the world. I haven’t played a game that so effectively uses my screen, mouse and keyboard as the functional part of its fictional user interface since Uplink.

An undoubted highlight of GDC every year is the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. Despite having that complete nonsense word in the title, it’s a chance for some of the most innovative and esoteric gaming ideas to be shared with one of the week’s biggest audiences, whether in development, released, or some impossible state in between. Some of the highlights are below.

Memory of a Broken Dimension is a strange thing. It’s an abstract and deeply beautiful exploration game, with a text adventure/hacking sort of thing at the start. That’s here. Right now I can’t tell if that’s just the text part, or whether you can get to the exploration part. It seems that you can’t. There’s a video of the full thing action below, as well as the presentation where it was revealed at the Tokyo game show. It’s quite the glitchy nightmare. Take a look!Read the rest of this entry »